Do Not
Cite or Distribute Loose
Version as a Basis for Freely Spoken Presentation

In this
interest of time, I’ll just say something directly: this is an
incredible book. Reading it, thinking it through, is extremely
rewarding. I haven’t read a work of philosophy that had as much
impact on me since being in school myself. The book presents youwith new ideas
and connectionsand it forces
you to see philosophy and its history in new ways, even if you (like
me) had been quite attached to your old ways. The book got into my
head. Now I find myself, in idle moments, arguing with Paul up there
in my head; as if there is a little copy of him in there now,making the case
for his versions of inferentialism and cognitive contextualism.Fortunately,
Paul is in my experience unfailingly nice, generous and sympathetic
even in argument—otherwise it might not be as nice to have a copy of
him in your head. Still, the copy pales in comparison to the
original, so it is great to be here.

I can’t do
justice to the book. But I will try to proceed as follows. I will
try to sketch the general line of thought I find so powerful. Then,
I will try to take up my assigned role as critic. The most
stimulating thing I can think of to do is to argue as follows:
Paul’s arguments concerning Kant and Hegel are largely successful,
but end up pushing us in directions that are not consistent with the
general approach to philosophy, and the general approach to Kant and
Hegel, from which Paul himself begins. So we should abandon that
general approach. That is what I will try, at least, to argue.

1.
Redding’s Basic Story about Kant and Hegel

In thinking
through the book, I’ve come to think that there is an important
general approach to philosophy that Paul shares with others, but
which Paul is further advancing here infruitful and
surprising directions all his own. It has come to seem important to
me to try to formulate the basic claim with which that approach
begins. I’m not sure how to precisely formulate the claim, and would
love some help. But the idea is, I think, that a problem concerning
meaning, content and understanding is of fundamental importance to
philosophy. It is “fundamental” in that, if we ignore it in pursuing
some other project, we risk drawing on covert assumptions about
meaning that will be our undoing. I guess I’ll call this the “fundamentality
of meaning” claim, although I’d also love
a better name. What is the basic problem? One formulation, from
Paul’s discussion of McDowell, is this: how can we [A1] “secure the
‘objective purport’ of thought” (22)? Or, as Paul cites Brandom: how
can we explain our understanding of claims [A2] “without an
ultimately circular appeal to semantic concepts such as intentional
content, concept-use, or the uptake of
representational purport (treated as an explanatory primitive)”
(75-6).

With respect to
Kant and Hegel, the general and initial interpretive claim (if I
understand it) is that they accept
the fundamentality of meaning. So Kant and Hegel themselves most
fundamentally pursue accounts of the meaningfulness of our thought,
or its objective purport.[1]
Further, each aims to make good on an anti-skeptical payoff promised
by that approach. Kant argues, for example, that the conditions of
the possibility of the meaningfulness of our concepts preclude
Humean skepticism. But Kant is also supposed to have his own problem
in this regard. Kant remains a kind of skeptic about our knowledge
of things in themselves. And this is a mistake. The mistake Kant
makes is that Kant fails to subject his own theory of things in
themselves to worries concerning the most fundamental philosophical
problem: the problem about meaning or semantics. So Kant falls prey
to the difficulties posed by those worries. In Paul’s terms:

[B] …should not
the idea of a conceivable but unknowable ‘thing-in-itself ’ be
regarded from the Kantian orientation as itself just as problematic
as the conception of it as knowable? Kant’s combination of
conceivability but unknowability seems to take away with the one
hand a quasi-divine epistemic take on the world – the so-called
‘God’s-eye view’ – only to return something like a semantic version
of it with the other (222)

So this is one
respect in which Kant’s own basic project—read as Kant’s attempt to
account for the meaningfulness of thought—requires carrying further.
And that is what Hegel is trying to do. Hegel tries to [c] “restore
substantive contentto philosophy
by undermining that residually dogmatically metaphysical assumption
responsible for Kant’s apparent denial of it.” (222)And that is why
Paul treats Hegel’s project as as an extension of Kant’s own
critical turn, or as “post-Kantian” (13).

What makes
Paul’s further development of this general approach so successful
and powerful, to my mind, is that he doesn’t stall out or return us
to where we were before beginning to philosophize; he shows how a
great many controversial and far-reachingpositive
philosophical commitments followin Kant and in
Hegel. What’s really
interesting is that Reading shows how all too many commitments
follow, in a sense, insofar as some of them will conflict.

What are these
commitments?

On the one
hand, Kant begins and Hegel completes a line of thought similar to
that later explored by McDowell. To put it in contemporary terms: we
must reject the myth of the given in understanding perception. But
we must also retain the role of perception in securing the objective
purport of our concepts. To do so, we must conclude that we have
direct experience of a world that is not beyond the conceptual. To
my mind, Paul renders this conclusion wonderfully clear and
philosophically compelling by showing that it is a revival of an
Aristotelian conclusion: the objects we perceive are supposed to be
Aristotelian substances,not “bare
pieces of ‘matter’” but rather “individual instances ofthing
kinds.” (31)Paulargues that the
roots of this line of thought are halfanticipated in
Kant, at least in some of what Kant says about intuition. But Kant
cannot carry through because he operates with two different accounts
of intuition. It is left toHegelto fully
develop the Aristotelian conclusions, especially in the
“Consciousness” section of the
Phenomenology.

On the other
hand, Kant begins and Hegel completes another line of thought,
similar to that later explored in Brandom’s discussions of
inferentialism. On Paul’s account, inferentialism is also a response
to a myth of the given—the myth of the “logical given.” Russell and
Moore fall prey to this myth just as Aristotle had: they hold a
representationalist view that cannot explain and so must just assume
the meaningfulness of logical categories:

[D] For
Aristotle, it would seem, the categories
reflected in the logical behaviour of our
words reflect structures properly belonging to being…

So for Russell…
the laws of thought are made true by an ontology.(61)

Kant reverses
this mistake: “for Kant the worldly structures – in the sense of theway that they
are for us – reflect the logical structures of our judgements” (61).And Paul arguesthat Kant
understands what it is to be a judgment in terms of what it is to be
fit to stand in larger explanatory
inferences. This is what Paul calls the
“Kantian source forHegel’s
inferentialism.” Again, Hegel will carry to completion this line of
thought, again in his discussion of “Consciousness” in the Phenomenology.

But here comes
a twist. Even this move away from Aristotle also depends on
Aristotle.Paul argues, as we’ve just heard, that Brandom’s
inferentialism depends on Aristotle’s term logic.[2]So far, then,
the moral is shaping up to be something like this: Aristotle! Can’t
live with him, can’t live without him…

But note the
wonderfully Hegelian manner in which at least one unified conclusion
already emerges from contradictory views:
whichever way we go, there is nothingto be said for
Russell’s claim that Hegel’s philosophy is outdated because
dependent on outdated Aristotelian logic. In some senses, Hegel has
excellent reasons for reviving
Aristotle—reasons that are in no sense outdated but play a big role
in philosophy today. In another sense, we do have reason to be
suspicious of Aristotle. But this is, ironically, reason to prefer
Hegel to Russell! It is reason to prefer Hegel’s inferentialism to
Russell’s representationalist account of logical meaning. At this
point, all I can do is marvel at the elegance of the way in which
the incredibly complex strands of Paul’s argument come together here
in a simple, beautiful result.

Coming back to
Hegel, Paul argues that Hegel combines the contradictory pro-and
anti-Aristotelian commitments. Hegel does so by means of a view that
Paul labels “cognitive contextualism.” The idea is that different
forms of logic, and corresponding different forms of negation, are
appropriate in different contexts, or different cognitive
orientations.[3]But I will come
back to this below.

II.
Kant’s Epistemic Modesty

I find
completely convincing what I take to be Paul’s central argument
about Kant. Kant’s faculty of the understanding is responsible for
judgment. But it requires positive guidance from the faculty of
reason, which is responsible for forming larger inferences in
pursuit of explanations.

judgement forms
are differentiated in terms of the way they function in forms of
explanation involving inferences (121)

So ajudgment, Paul
says, should be

[f] read as
containing a
syllogism which is made explicit in the explanation. All this, I
suggest, means that Kant gives a much more
positive role to reason than is
traditionally acknowledged (122)

So the action
of the Critique
is located, more than we would expect from what Paul calls
“textbook” readings, in positive claims about the role of reasonin the
“Transcendental Dialectic”.

But I think
we’ve now jettisoned Paul’s own starting point. I take it that the
faculty of reason does its work by supplying us with ideas.In Kant’s
terms, it most fundamentally provides us with the idea of the unconditioned. Reason,
then, directs us to seek to explain
things by seeking their underlying
conditions.Ultimately, reason directs us to aim for complete
explanation by seeking underlying complete or total unconditioned grounds.[4]
Of course, Kant denies us knowledge of anything unconditioned.[5]
Such knowledge would be possible only without our dependence on
sensible intuition, or only with intellectual intuition, or only
with a divine intellect in this sense. So principles from our
faculty of reason can be legitimate only in their role guiding our
research, or only as regulative principles. But we cannot claim
knowledge that there must really existfor everything
conditioned some unconditioned ground. I take it that this is to say
that we cannot claim knowledge of the truth of the rationalists’
principle of sufficient reason. Nor can we claim knowledge of any of
the conclusions rationalists generate on the basis of that
principle—we cannot claim the rationalists’ knowledge of soul,
cosmos, or God.[6]

Things in
themselves

But note that
these resources of the Transcendental Dialectic account of reason,
emphasized by Paul himself, are precisely what allow Kant to operate
with a conception of something unknowable for us—something that
could be known only from a divine point of view.[7]

Granted,
perhaps there is reason to worry about the intelligibility of idea
of a “God’s eye view” in the sense that seems to so worry Nietzsche
(for example): the sense of a perspective on things that takes no
particular point of view on things at all. Perhaps Nietzsche’s idea
of a God’s eye view is incoherent. Perhaps it would make no sense to
desire such a point of view, nor to be disappointed to lack it. But
Paul’s emphasis on Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic and our pursuit
of explanation leads us to the conclusion that what Kant takes us to
desireis something else—we desire completeness of
explanatory insight; that certainly seems intelligible to me; and Kant has
wonderfully principled reasons for thinking that we can’t get it.

By contrast,
commitment to the fundamentality of problems concerning meaning
inclines Paulto worry that Kant should
not allow a meaningful concept of anything
unknowable. Paul thinks that the same reasons Kant has for denying
knowledge should lead him to deny meaning or conceivability. Kant is
supposed to illegitimately rely on a “semantic version” of “the
so-called ‘God’s-eye view’” and this is a “dogmatically metaphysical
assumption”.

It is here that
Paul’s own success interpreting Kant leads me to conclude that we
should give up the idea that Kant is most fundamentally worried
about explaining all meaning or content or understanding.We can’t
mistake this point once we follow Paul in recognizing the importance
of the account of the faculty of reasonand explanation
in the Dialectic. Then we see that Kant’s central goal is to save
what is worth saving but otherwise to destroy rationalist
metaphysics. Kant does so by arguing that the faculty of reason
provides us with meaningful
ideas of goals that guide us in seeking explanation, while our
dependence on the faculty of sensibility blocks knowledge of whether
anything real corresponds to those ideas.

This project
also structures much of Kant’s work back in Transcendental Aesthetic
and the Analytic, and provides a great deal of motivation for his
distinctions between the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding,
and Reason. Kant must delicately show that employing concepts of the
Understanding without intuition from Sensibility leaves us without
a certain kind of meaning—meaning in the sense of a relation to a
determinate object with respect to which we could determine truth or
falsity—it leaves us without possibility of cognition and its relation
to an objection, and so without theoretical knowledge in any sense.[8]But Kant
carefully allows that unschematized categories of the Understanding
can be employed with a kind of meaning beyond the limits of our
knowledge: [ j] ‘even after abstraction from every sensible
condition’ the categories retain ‘a logical significance’
(A147/B186). [k] And ‘the categories are not restricted in thinkingby the
conditions of our sensible intuition, but have an unbounded field’
(B166n).[9]So [L] ‘I can
think what I like, as long as I do not contradict myself”.[10]

If you instead
leave us without any way to think of what we cannot know, then you
are not further advancing Kant’s epistemic modesty—you are
destroying it. Philosophy has been down that path before: Berkeley
claims to be extending epistemic modesty into a way of taking more
seriously the modest doctrine of concept empiricism, until we
realize that we cannot even have a meaningful or coherent concept of
an external material object.[11]
Presto: no more skepticism! But we should recognize Berkeley’s
idealism here as an ambitious metaphysical conclusion. That is fine,
in my book. But we should not be fooled into thinking that this is
any way to further the cause of epistemic modesty, or that it can be
supported by the rejection of dogmatism; anyone truly aiming for
epistemic modesty—like Kant—will recoil in horror.

Granted, Kant
cannot provide any further explanation of the meaning of the ideas
of reason. Reason provides meaningful ideas. Reason is spontaneous
in this respect. End of story, as far as I can see. But why should
we mind that “end of story”? Kant does not claim to explain the
meaningfulness of the ideas beyond this point. And he does not claim
to give any kind of complete explanation of any and all meaning.
Ideas like the idea of the unconditioned do
have meaning; now that positivism is behind us, would anyone doubt
it? Kant just takes this plainly accessible meaningful idea as
basic, and gets stunning results by doing so. Everyone must take
something as basic, or given. I cast my humble vote for restricting
accusations of succumbing to myths
of the given for the very different case in which someone claims to explain some X
and yet really covertly assumes X as given—for example someone
claims to explain meaning but does not, or claims to explain
epistemic justification but does not. If someone is instead happy to
take some kind of meaning as given but you don’t think that this
should be taken as given, then it seems to me you need a longer
argument against them—perhaps an argument for the premise of the
fundamentality and unavoidability of problems about meaning.[12]
[13]

Further, what
exactly could one charge that Kant is missing? Perhaps an
explanation of meaning in terms that do not presuppose meaning?Perhaps more
specifically an explanation of the normativity of meaning in
non-normative terms?But can anyone
do that? My sense
is that this would be very difficult. For everyone. If so, then
everyone will have to take meaning for granted at some point. I see
no problem with Kant taking the meaning of reason’s ideas for
granted right away, and attacking the problems he finds most
pressing.
[14]

We should
not conclude from
this that there is some deep tension or fault-line within Kant’s
philosophy. [e.g. Putnam in M] Obviously, if someone is
fundamentally concerned with explaining meaning or content, then
they can look at Kant through that lens, and they can find passages
which fit with their concern and passages which do not. But you
could look at Kant through any number of lenses and find any number
of dividing lines. That’s no reason to think there is a fault-line
intrinsic to Kant’s philosophy.[15]We should
instead conclude that Kant’s own fundamental philosophical concern
is not with
explaining all possibility of meaning or content or understanding.
And, as far as I can see, there is no philosophical reason to think
there is anything wrong with Kant on this score.

In sum, Paul’s
core case about Kant is entirely convincing. But I draw moralsfrom it that
Paulprobably won’t like. First, Kant does not succumb to
a problem concerning meaning. And Kant does not need completing in
this respect—not by Hegel, nor by contemporary philosophical
accounts of meaning. And this seems to me an excellent case in which
attention to history can teach us important lessons about philosophy
generally. For I wonder, further, whether Kant’s successes in
pursuit of his own fundamental goals shouldn’t lead us to handle
more skeptically the idea that philosophical problems of meaning
must always be unavoidably fundamental?

3. An
Intolerable Oscillation

Now I think
that much the same is true of Hegel: Paul’s core case concerning
Hegel is entirely convincing. But it forces us in the direction of
rejecting the basic philosophical approach with which Paul himself
begins.

What I
specifically find convincing is Paul’s account of Hegel as reviving
aspects of Aristotle’s metaphysics. This seems to me to fit Hegel
like a glove. That is, I think that Hegel takes the sciences to aim
at knowledge of these kinds and the natural laws which connect them
in relations of material consequence and exclusion. (I like
Brandom’s examples: it
is objectively necessary
that pure copper melt at 1084°
C., and impossible for a mass to be accelerated without being subjected
to some force.) I think that Hegel seeks to argue that the kinds
themselves naturally fall into different groups or levels. And
Hegel’s metaphysical project is this: he seeks to delineate these
groups, and so to establish conclusions about the structure of
reality itself.

Further, as
Paul notes, this line of thought brings out a solid contact between
Hegel and recent analytic philosophy: there has been a

[N] (a)revival of
Aristotelian ideas within analytic philosophy in the final third of
the twentieth century. David Armstrong, for example, had
reintroduced universals into analytic metaphysics in a way that
linked them to laws of nature (44)

This line of
thought brings us to more metaphysical questions: What are these natural kinds?
How do they relate to one another? Etc. As far as I can see, there
is nothing stopping us, at this point, from focusing our attention
more directly on problems in metaphysics, without any special
constraint by philosophical considerations concerning meaning.

But Paul seems
to me to pull back here. He says that the line he is pursuing—he is
specifically talking about McDowell’s engagement with Evans—leads
not to the sort of Aristotelian metaphysics revived recently by
Armstrong. It rather

(b)bears more of a
family resemblance to the more explicitly
Kant-oriented version of essentialism
found in the work of Hilary Putnam.72
Like Kant, Putnam focuses upon the role played by the subjective
conditions of determinacy that allow our thoughts to have a content.
(c)Like Aristotle, however, (and like Hegel) Putnam
thinks of the conceptual ‘kind’ structures that individual thought
tracks as ‘in the world’ rather than ‘in the head’.

But it seems to
me that we are just moving in a circle here. Paul can’t sit still
with the Aristotelian metaphysics of (a), perhaps because it leaves
the fundamentality of meaning behind. So he turns to Kant and talk
of subjective conditions as in (b). But he can’t sit still here
either. For this would now suggest that we are talking about our
conceptual scheme, as opposed to unknowable things in themselves.
Paul’s focus on problems of meaning leads him to think that this
Kantian stance is incoherent. So he moves on to the Aristotelian
metaphysics of (c), which looks to me like moving back to (a). My
worry is that Paul’s initial focus on problems about meaning and
content prevent him from going in either direction, and force him to
try to land somewhere in between. But I am not yet convinced that
there is a stable philosophical position in between. So this seems
to me like an intolerable oscillation.

But it seems to
me easy to resolve the intolerable oscillation here. We need only
drop the idea that problems about meaning are somehow supposed to be
so fundamental, and the idea that Kant and Hegel agree and so are
most fundamentally trying to explaining meaning. I have already
explained why I think that dropping this allows us to better
appreciate Kant’s philosophical aims and advantages.

Now I will turn
to make a similar case with respect to Hegel’s very different
philosophical project, and its very different and competing
philosophical advantages.

IV.
Hegel’s Metaphysics

First of all, I
don’t think that Hegel’s pursuit of
metaphysical questionsneed fall prey
to any epistemological
or semantic myths
of the given.[16][17]The reasons are
the same as those given above: it is not clear to me that there is
anything wrong with taking the meaning of our meaningful words as
given, and then using them to try to answer metaphysical questions.
As least not as long as we lack an a priori
reason for thinking that metaphysics should be held hostage to
either epistemology or semantics, or cannot begin until the later
are complete.Certainly Hegel
does not think that we need be held hostage in this way. He
recognizes that some would want to delay our seeking metaphysical
knowledge of e.g. “the essence of things.” They would have us delay
until we have knowledge of our own “faculty of cognition”. Hegel
rejects the insistence on understanding our cognition before
addressing the metaphysical questions such as those concerning the
essence of things: to urge to delay is like what Hegel calls [o]
“the wise resolve of Scholasticus to learn to swim before he
ventured in the water” (§10An).[18],[19]I take the
moral to be that we should address more directly metaphysical
questions and concerns, such as those concerning the essence of
things.

Convinced as I
am by Paul’s case about Hegel’s commitment to revive aspects of
Aristotle’s metaphysics, I find myself with worries about each of
Paul’s account of both of his two cognitive orientations. First,
Paul argues that, to deal with problems concerning the perceptual
given, something like Aristotle’s forms or thing-kinds are supposed
to play a direct role in perception.But Paulalso worries
about the idea of a

[P] world of
self-subsistent substances or things-in-themselves … somehow unproblematically
epistemically presented to a subject before whom they stand
(Aristotle)[20]

I’m happy to go
along with Paul’s worry. But the worry does not concern any part of
the metaphysics of Aristotelian kinds. The worry concerns an epistemological claim
about the role of those kinds in perception. The worry concerns the
claim that natural kinds are in perception “epistemically presented
to a subject.”It seems to me that this is an epistemological claim
that Hegel emphatically denies. Hegel denies that natural kinds show
up directly in perception. For example:

[R] The
universal does not exist externally to the outward eye as universal.
The kind as kind cannot be perceived: the laws of celestial motion
are not written in the sky. (§21Z)

Rather,we seek
explanatory knowledge by thinking about what we observe, and drawing
inferences about the natural laws and kinds which explain our
observations.[21]So I didn’t
understand why Paul so closely associated the Aristotelian metaphysicswith the
difficulties encountered in the “Perception” section in the Phenomenology. I don’t
see that any worries about perception (or any worries about
semantics or epistemology at all)in any way
qualify Hegel’s commitment to the
metaphysical claim for the reality of the
natural kinds.

Paul’s other
cognitive orientation is, I think, a form of holism. It seems to me
that a wonderful payoff of Paul’s case concerning Hegel and
Aristotle is that we need not read Hegel’s holism as an attempt to
account for meaning or content. We can read it rather as a claim
about the natural kinds. So Hegel will argue, especially in the
“Reason” section of the Phenomenology,
that the very nature of the sort of natural kind that figure in the
laws of nature will depend on its relations to others in laws—and so
on the whole network of laws and kinds. What it is to be acidic, for
example, depends on how acids react with bases. For example, the
relation between acids and bases, that ‘they are only this relation’
(Phän 3:195/153).[22][23]

Now clearly
there is something disturbing about this holism. To be any
particular node just is to stand in certain relations to others.
But, if so, then we independently say what
it is that really stands in those
relations!Perhaps if this were a theory attempting to explain
meaning, then this problem would show it to be an incomplete theory.

But once I buy
Paul’s connection between Hegel and Aristotle, then I’m going to
want to see this holism as metaphysics. (Perhaps Betrand Russell
thought that things couldn’t possibly be like this—they couldn’t
possibly be the “bowl of jelly” Brandom referred to.
But I see no reason to think Hegel would have to agree. I think
Hegel argues that SOME things are disturbingly gelatinous. This
holism) is supposed to be a correct
account specifically of the lower-levels of
nature—of the natural kinds that figure in
exceptionless laws of nature.This is
disturbing, to be sure. But what is disturbing here is not a theory,
whether a theory of meaning or of anything else. Rather, the things
themselves are disturbingly insubstantial or gelatinous. There is
something confounding and even
contradictory about the lower-levels of
nature themselves.[24]On the lower
levels, everything is dependent. But to say this is to imply that
there is ultimately something—some substantial individuals or a
substantial whole—that is independent enough for other things to
depend on it. But the implication is contradicted by the lack of
anything independently substantial upon which things on this level
depend. The parts or notes depend on one another within a whole
network, [V] so that the concept or “Begriff of the whole” is “the
real kind of the particular object”; but this whole itself merely
presupposes the differentiated kinds, or depends on their
differentiation as a kind of posit: “the chemical object … is thus
the contradiction of its immediate positedness and its immanent
individual concept” (WL 4:430/728).

So once I buy
Paul’s argument about Hegel and Aristotle, this seems to me to send
us toward a very different account of Hegel’s view of the
contradiction in things. A payoff of this approach is that it
captures a very different sense in which Hegel is furthering Kant’s
critical turn against rationalist metaphysics. Rationalists find the
apparentlack of
substantiality in nature as reason to think that there must be some
hidden deeper substance on which things depend. So rationalists
assert that the true substance of things is hidden; it could be best
appreciated by a deeper insight, a divine perspective.Kant preserves
rationalist ideas about the sort of insight we seek, but Kant much
more rigorously denies us access to knowledge, concluding that we
cannot know whether there is any hidden substantiality to things
beyond surprisingly insubstantial matter in space, consisting [x, y]
“wholly of relations.”[25]Hegel has a
very different way of leaving pre-critical rationalism behind. Hegel
asserts knowledge
that there is notany deeper
substance to the lower levels of nature: they are confoundingly
insubstantial, even though this and amounts to a kind of real
contradiction; reason can be satisfied only by the substance of
higher-level phenomena: partly by consideration of natural
teleological phenomena in biology. But only Geist is truly substance.
The whole of everything is not substance, insofar as nature is
progressively less and less substantial as one descends.[26]

Paul ends up in
a different position. His Hegel embraces two contradictory
orientations, and this means that everything in the world turns out
to be contradictory. One way Paul has of trying to explain this
conclusion is to say that there is after all substance to the world.
But not anything akin to Aristotle’s finite substances as stable
substrates of change. Rather, there is the substance of something
like Aristotle’s divine mind thinking itself, something which does
not lack “the principles of ‘life’ and ‘subjectivity.’”Another way is
to say that the world is such that we cannot entirely state, from
the perspective of either available cognitive orientation, what is
the case in the world. The world is rather what shows itself in our
thought, even as this is shot through as this is with contradiction.Our grasp of
the world as a whole is akin to what Wittgenstein calls “the
mystical.”But the moral is supposed to be not that we should,
with Wittgenstein, remain silent. Rather:[Z] “Hegel was
committed to the project of rendering the whole ‘felt’ in mystical
experience explicit.”

But if there is
no way to overcome the contradiction between cognitive orientations,
then this would mean that we must strive infinitely to make explicit
what cannot ever be made explicit. That’s an interesting view, but
it doesn’t seem to me Hegelian. (It seems like the sort of “bad
infinite” that Brandom mentions and associates with Fichte.)

Further, this
kind of view seems to me to result in a position similar to those of
Hegel’s contemporaries who Hegel sees as trying to revive
rationalist metaphysics and combine it with mysticism. They argue
that there is deeper substance to the whole of everything, even if
we cannot grasp it in finite, rational thinking—perhaps because it
is alive, or moving, or self-conscious, or self-contradictory, etc.But Hegel seems
to me to excoriate such views. His comment on Schelling[27]is typical:
“One wants, if one philosophizes, to have proven that it is so”; but
with Schelling’s appeal to intellectual intuition of the whole, “the
proving of anything, the making it comprehensible, is thus
abandoned.”[28]
I wasn’t sure, but wanted to ask, how Paul’s “felt” mystical grasp
of the world was supposed to differ on this score.[29]

In sum, I find
myself completely convinced by what I take to be Paul’s core
arguments concerning Kant and Hegel. But I draw morals that I don’t
think Paul will like. I think that both core arguments require us to
give up the basic approach with which Paul begins—to give up the
fundamentality of problems concerning meaning. Doing so allows us to
better appreciate Kant and Hegel’s very different positions, and the
very different advantages of each. It allows us to appreciate Kant’s
prescription of epistemic modesty as the antidote to rationalism,
even though this turns on taking the meanings of some ideas as basic
or given. And it allows us to appreciate Hegel’s very different
attempt to defend a metaphysicsthat is flatly,
and radically different than the rationalists’. It also allows us to
appreciate the direct connection between Hegel and the current focus
in analytic philosophy on metaphysics.

Probably I have
much of this wrong, but I do hope that it is wrong in a way that
stimulates discussion. I hope, that is, that I could stimulate
debate by explaining to how from Paul’s book I learned a contrarian
lesson: how to worry less about meaning and love both Kant’s
epistemic modesty and also Hegel’s metaphysics.

End

[1] So the idea
will be that Kant’s basic goal, in distinguishing concept from
intuition, is to account for how it is that our judgments have objective
purport, and how that meaning is grounded in experience in some way. If
the concept/intuition distinction cannot do
that, then it will fail to meet its goal. If
Hegel can do better here, then he will have good claim to be completing
Kant’s critical philosophy if he aims to do better in this respect, and
succeeds.

[2]This poses a
difficulty for Brandom’s later development of inferentialism. Brandom
leans on ideas similar to Hegel’s “determinate negation” in articulating
his claims about relations of material consequence and incompatibility.
And Paul argues that this idea from Hegel, and inferentialism itself,
relies on more Aristotelian views. It depends “on features of
Aristotelian logic that have no simple equivalent in the Fregean logic
that Brandom endorses.”Brandom needs the
“mutually excluding contraries of Aristotle’s term logic to capture the
type of entailment relations that fit his inferentialist account. On
asserting that an object is blue all over, for example, we commit
ourselves to the further assertion that it is
not red all over”(83). And Paul extends from
here to argue that Brandom cannot have an Aristotle-free alternative to
McDowell’s account of perception: even Brandom’s appeal to the idea of
reliable discrimination presupposes objects that are Aristotelian
substances: objects of some kind
that cannot admit contrary properties.

[3]In line
with what I have called his cognitive contextualism, Hegel regarded term
negation as appropriate in particular contexts and inappropriate in
others

[4]: “the
proper principle of reason in general … is to find the unconditioned for
conditioned cognitions of the understanding” (A307/B364).

[5] For he
denies that we can have knowledge of anything unconditioned: knowledge
requires intuition; in our case that means intuition from sensibility;
and the forms of our sensibility, space and time, will prevent knowledge
of anything unconditioned “in sensibility, i.e. in space and time, every
condition to which we can attain in the exposition of given appearances
is in turn conditioned” (A508/B536).

[6]For
example, this principle is the ground on which the ‘the entire antinomy
of pure reason rests’: ‘If the conditioned is given, then the whole
series of all conditions for it is also given’ (A497/B525). And this
principle is a version of the principle of sufficient reason: for
anything that is not a sufficient reason for itself, or for anything
conditioned, there must be a complete series of conditions that provides
for it a sufficient reason.

[7] As Kant
says in the B-preface summary of the main argument of the Critique: That which
necessarily drives us to go beyond the boundaries of experience and all
appearances is the unconditioned,
which reason necessarily and with every right demands in things
themselves for everything that is conditioned. (Bxx)

[9] Adams
(1997: 807-8); also Clark (1985). Kant does say that merely
‘intelligible objects … without any schema of sensibility’ are
‘impossible’ (A286/B342). But even right here he continues to introduce
a sense of noumenon
that is ‘problematic’ in this sense: it is a ‘representation of a thing
of which we can say neither that it is possible nor that it is
impossible’ (A286-7/B343).

[10] Bxxvi
note. Some ideas of
unknowable objects generate contradictions. But it is crucial to Kant’s
project, as he emphasizes, that this claim is restricted to the ideas of
the spatio-temporal world as a completed, unconditioned whole: ‘The
first two antinomies … are founded on such a contradictory concept’ (P
4:341). That claim does not apply to the ideas central to the second two
antinomies. Nor does it apply to psychological and theological ideas
(A673/B701).

[11]it is
plain that the very notion of what is called matter, or corporeal
substance, involves a contradiction in it. (472)

[12] Consider
Sellars on the myth of the given. I take it that his central targets are
those who specifically seek to provide an explanation of epistemological
support or justification. They succumb to the myth of the given insofar
as they appeal to given sense-data that cannot play the role of
justifying—so they have to smuggle in the justification without
explaining it. Perhaps there is an analogous myth of the given with
respect to meaning rather than epistemology. To succumb to this myth
would be to aim to explain how meaning is possible, while illegitimately
smuggling meaning in without explaining it. That would bebad, I agree. But I
don’t see Kant succumbing to this problem.

[13] Obviously,
if we think of a concept empiricist, she would be unhappy with Kant’s
position. She would demand a further explanation of the meaning of
reason’s idea of the unconditioned. But it is equally obvious that a
concept empiricist won’t be able to preserve what Kant thinks he needs
saving from rationalism: the guiding role of reason and of the idea
which “necessarily drives us to go beyond the boundaries of experience.”
And Redding is right that this guiding role is crucially important in
Kant.

[14]
Furthermore, say a doctrine like concept empiricism threatens to show
that concepts like Kant’s concept of the unconditioned cannot have any
meaning. It seems to me clear that I do have a meaningful concept here.
As it has seemed to many philosophers concerned with such issues. My
grasp on this meaning seems much more secure than my grasp on why I
should buy anything like concept empiricism. Excellent reason, then, to
reject such doctrines. A Moorean response to semantic
skepticism!

[15] E.g.
Putnam: ‘Kant has, in a way, two philosophies’, because sometimes Kant
claims that ‘we cannot really form any intelligible notion of a noumenal
thing’ and yet sometimes Kant claims that ‘there is God, Freedom and
Immortality’ in a real ‘noumenal’ world (1987: 41-2). It seems clear to
me that Kant’s goal is a single consistent philosophy that fits neither
view seen by Putnam: we must conceive of God, Freedom and Immortality;
but we cannot have theoretical knowledge of whether there are such
things.

[16] Perhaps
one could charge me at some particular point in my metaphysical project
with making a specific claim without explaining how that claim could
possibly be known to be true. That can certainly be fair. But much
hinges here on more specific characterization of the epistemological
challenge. Critics tend to help themselves to really powerful
challenges. For example, I prefer a recently popular and metaphysically
robust account of the laws of nature, which Redding mentions and notes
as another form of the re-emergence of Aristotle’s influence in
philosophy. I think that there are laws of nature, and that these
determine what can and cannot happen, thus determining the regularities.
So I do not think that laws are
regularities. It is sometimes said that the regularity view enjoys an
epistemological advantage, but this seems unproven to me. Granted, I
have no argument that would defeat Cartesian skepticism and show that we
can have knowledge that there are such robust laws of nature. But by
that standard our knowledge of regularities will be in severe trouble as
well. Even our knowledge of the external world will be in trouble! You
can try to deploy here inference to the best explanation (IBE) and claim
that external objects are the best explanation of our experience. I
doubt this really helps with full-blown Cartesian skepticism. But it is
fine with me nonetheless, since all I claim to be doing is inferring to
the existence of Aristotelian laws of nature are the best explanation of
our observed regularities. In any case, my interest remains in which
metaphysical claims are the best. If a particular epistemological
standard looks to make things equally troubling either way, then
epistemology doesn’t promise to tell me what I want to know, so I’ll
feel fine about looking away from epistemology and back to metaphysics.

[17] Perhaps
instead the worry is that my metaphysics might not include the elements
necessary to explain the meaningfulness of our concepts. But what is the
specific challenge here? Perhaps the challenge is that my metaphysics
might not include the elements that would allow us to explain the
normatively of meaning in non-normative terms. But can anyone explain this? Until
someone pulls it off, we are all going to be taking meaning or something
like it as given—at least at some point. This is great for me: I take it
as given at the beginning. I have concepts. I take them to be
meaningful, as they seem to be. And I immediately set to work using my
concepts to pursue the problems that I take to be most pressing, along
with the many in the history of philosophy: the problems of metaphysics.

[18] Granted, I
think this aspect of Hegel’s project is much more clearly reflected in
the organization of his later system, and there is much debate about the
relation of this system to the earlier
Phenomenology of Spirit—the text preferred by
Redding. Still, the Phenomenology too seems to me clearly about metaphysics—about the
nature of reality. Somewhere in the transition from “Consciousness” to
“Self-consciousness” we move from the conclusion that an independently
active subject is required for there to be any knowledge, and into
metaphysical consideration of whether there is anything independently
active in the world—and what such a thing would have to be like, and how
it would relate to other things.

[19]And Hegel
recognizes that the use of epistemological and semantic arguments
against metaphysical views is often mere pretense. Empiricists, for
example, may attack claims about necessary connections in nature:
epistemological attacks would deny us knowledge of whether such claims
are true; semantic attacks would deny that we can even have a meaningful
concept of necessary connection. But Hegel sees the real motive here as
a preference for one kind of metaphysics over another. Empiricists
prefer a metaphysics in which everything is loose and separate, as Hume
says. A metaphysics according to which there are only things that are
entangled in no necessary connections, such as “alterations that follow one after the other”
and “objects that lie side by side”
(§39). Hegel suspects, and I agree, that empiricist epistemology and
semantics won’t really justify the former over the latter. So where
empiricism attacks the metaphysics, but it does so “without knowing that
it thereby itself contains a metaphysics” (§38An). I take the moral to
be that we should bypass the pretense and more directly address the
question of which metaphysics is better. And yet, it might be objected,
particular metaphysical commitments can nevertheless still be discerned
within the philosophy that characteristically develops along with this
displacement – epistemology – especially when
tied to conceptions of ‘the given’.

[20] And
Redding thinks that Hegel sees the need for another cognitive
orientation: the more reflective
orientation characteristic of the sciences and that he calls ‘the
Understanding’ [Verstand].

[21]in thinking
about things, we always seek what is fixed, persisting and inwardly
determined, and what governs the particular” (§21Zu). What does
govern the particular? Universal laws and kinds: The empirical sciences
do not stop at the perception of single instances of appearance; but
through thinking they have prepared the material for philosophy by
finding universal determinations, kinds, and laws (§12An).

[22]‘the
chemical object is not comprehensible from itself alone, and the being
of one is the being of the other’ (WL 6:430/728). And this will mean
that the ‘being’ of such a kind will depend on the whole interconnected
network of kinds and laws within which it is a part. In Hegel’s terms,
on this level of nature the ‘determinateness’ of anything in particular
‘is the concrete moment of the individual concept [Begriff] of the
whole, which Begriff is the universal essence, the real kind [Gattung]
of the particular object’ (WL 6:430/728).

[23] Wherever
we come to basic kinds and laws—although we may now think that these
kinds are much lower-level kinds—Hegel’s claim is that we will here find
kinds that depend on one another: what it is to be an election is to
react in certain ways with protons. Or some yet lower-level story.

[24] We can
observe an instance of some physical kind—some acid, for example—and it
certainly seems independently substantial. But when we seek to
understand what it is we are observing, we find something confusing: it
‘gets lost’ in its relations with others, or dissolved into chains of
dependence; it ‘becomes something else than it is empirically, confuses
cognition’ (Phän 3:190/149).

[25]All that
we know in matter is merely relations (what we call the inner
determinations of it are inward only in a comparative sense) … It is
certainly startling to hear that a thing is to be taken as consisting
wholly of relations. Such a thing is, however, mere appearance
(A285/B341) “substantia phaenomenon
in space; its inner determinations are nothing but relations, and it
itself is entirely made up of mere relations…”(A266/B322)

[26] (This is a
claim for a priority of Geist
or spirit over nature. But we don’t need to read it as a claim for the
philosophical priority of problems concerning meaning over metaphysical
problems concerning the nature of natural kinds and the like. Rather,
the priority claim is part of Hegel’s metaphysics. It is a claim that
the kind of thing that understands meaning, the kind of thing that we
are, is in a respect higher or more fundamental than the kind of things
that does not, like copper, which just melts at a certain temperature
but doesn’t and cannot understand why. Our kind is prior in that it is
more independently substantial that the kinds that “get lost” in
non-terminating chains of dependence.

[28] VGP
20:434-5/3:525. On this line of argument see Westphal 1989a and 2000.

[29] In any
case, it seems to me that, sooner or later, one must recognize Hegel’s
metaphysics. If we read his arguments along the way as addressed to
problems concerning meaning, then when we turn to the metaphysics we
will find a kind of leap beyond the arguments—just the kind of thing
Hegel himself complains about. But the remedy is to recognize that the
arguments were, from the beginning, more focus on metaphysics than
meaning. Then we can recognize that Hegel is doing what he tells us he
is doing: embracing Kant’s critical turn, but reacting to it by arguing
for a very different kind of metaphysics.